Online Fashion Becoming: Redefining the Voices of Fashion

Fashion Becoming is an online symposium that aims to examine the changing landscape of fashion, featuring Angela McRobbie as keynote speaker.

While resources for fashion education and content are more prevalent than ever due to social media and the rising popularity of independent fashion actors, the contemporary fashion space is not equally open to all.

We will consider the Euro-American fashion landscape and question its internal discourses and institutions, investigating how a dominating voice in global fashion curates, others, and challenges its constituents. In this current system questions of monetary costs toward education, hyper-trends, diversity, gatekeeping and power dynamics vacillate and compete for influence in defining what fashion is and how it operates.

Fashion Becoming looks to question how and what fashion is becoming with consideration to the barriers to entry and expansion in the field, the competing tendencies of democratisation and exclusion, and the role of cultural intermediaries in the maintenance and creation of the former phenomena. The symposium will consist of panel discussions and talks under three primary sections: Barriers to Fashion Education, Democratisation of Fashion, and Cultural Intermediaries, each of which provide insight into the evolving fashion system.

Organised collaboratively by students from Parsons Paris MA Fashion Studies, London College of Fashion MA Fashion Cultures and Histories and V&A/RCA History of Design MA, we invite a diverse audience ranging from students, academics, and industry professionals and welcome voices both party to and challenged by the Euro-American voice of fashion to engage in this stimulating discourse. Fashion Becoming is a platform for anyone passionate about understanding the boundaries and possibilities in contemporary fashion, shaping the future of the fashion system and redefining the voices of fashion.

Event Schedule:

9.45am - 10.30am: Welcome to the Symposium

10.30am - 12.15pm: Barriers to Fashion Education

While fashion is everywhere it is not equally accessible to all, barriers to fashion questions the costs and exclusivity of fashion education and careers. Introduction and closing Q&A with Antony Sullivan. Presentations from Ayaka Kitagawa, Giulia Coluccello and Xingyun Shen, and Beata Wilczek.

12.15pm - 1pm: Lunch break

1pm - 1.45pm: Keynote Speaker Angela McRobbie.

Angela McRobbie FBA is Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths. Her most recent (co-authored) book is Fashion as Creative Economy (with Dan Strutt and Carolina Bandinelli). In 2024 she will publish Ulrike Ottinger: Film Art and the Ethnographic Imagination (Intellect Books) and Feminism, Young Women and cultural Studies: the Birmingham Essays from 1975 Onwards (Goldsmiths Press).

Presenting her lecture Fashion Spaces, Urban Policy, and Social Critique, McRobbie will argue that the practice of fashion design is closely interwoven with the social conditions of its emergence: the urban environment, access to studio space, the capacity to create a sustainable livelihood. Challenging the mythologies of ‘passionate labour’ and the ‘dream’ job without dispensing with the aesthetic value of the creative practice, the lecturer braes on a recent three-city study to propose an analytic of ‘the milieu of fashion labour’ with a focus on ‘social fashion’ and ‘pedagogies for regional regeneration’.

1.50pm - 2.45pm: Democratisation of Fashion

Democratising asks if fashion media has changed: are there new kinds of voices, are more people able to make impactful opinions, is fashion more accessible than before? Presentations from ⁠Michela Musto and Colectivo Malvestidas, followed by Q&A.

3pm - 5pm: Cultural Intermediaries

Cultural Intermediaries occupy liminal spaces in fashion media: influencing consumers and engaging with institutions, expanding and gatekeeping access to fashion and acting as tastemakers and followers. Can their role in between provide a way to reshape and dissect fashion systems? Introduction with Kevin Quinn. Presentations from Floriane Fo Misslin, Ross Schartel, Irene Calvi, and Mo Shi followed by Q&A panel.

5 - 5.30pm: Closing Remarks